Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil Read online

  Tell the

  Truth &

  Shame the

  Devil

  As told to the author

  by a little old man

  in a plaid shirt

  DEDICATION:

  For Germany.

  For Germans who still

  want to be German.

  For Humanity.

  Tell the

  Truth &

  Shame the

  Devil

  As told to the author

  by a little old man

  in a plaid shirt

  By Gerard Menuhin

  Published by The Barnes Review 2015

  “Sorrow is knowledge;

  they who know the most,

  must mourn the deepest

  o’er the fatal truth,

  the Tree of Knowledge

  is not that of Life.”

  —Byron, Manfred

  I

  THWARTED: HUMANITY’S LAST GRASP FOR FREEDOM

  This dog is a Labrador. Seldom barks and is good-natured, like most Labradors. Now and then, I join its owner for one of his daily rounds to air the animal. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. Initially, he did his duty by trying to convert me, but I told him that I don’t believe in anything I can’t see, so he gave up. If I needed to worship anything, it would be trees. Trees have this in common with a folk culture and a manufacturing economy: both are rooted in the ground and so are stable. A seasonal or service economy, supplying a may-fly community of consumers, is unstable. Any tree is worth countless consumers, as they rarely provide anything beneficial. What they can and often do is to destroy trees. It takes a subhuman with a chainsaw only seconds to cut down what has taken maybe hundreds of years to grow. Picture an oak. This admirable tree stands on a hill and affords a majestic view. Its furrowed trunk towers into the sky. It has seen more seasons than any person. It has withstood countless winter storms. Its presence is ennobling even when leafless. It doesn’t have to do anything, it just is. Then along comes a consumer (an organism that obtains what it craves by helping itself to other organisms) with a saw and cuts it down for boards or even for firewood. Which would you rather have, the organism or the oak?

  Leading on from the consumer, don’t speak to me about the dignity of man. I haven’t seen a dignified human for a long time, if ever. That is because dignity implies personal responsibility. The Dignity of Man is just like the Rights of Man, an artificial concept, invented by artificial, cosmopolitical bodies like the U.N. or the Court of Human Rights, to displace national laws; intangible claptrap intended to usurp established rights. Based on the fraudulent “Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme” of 1789, they exalted the empty excitations “Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité.” If the right to clean air and water is not guaranteed, and to freedom of speech and assembly, of what use are these sonorous declarations?

  My neighbour and I agree on many topics, except that, like most sectarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Christ will return to save them. I expound on the degradation of everything and he responds with quotes from the Scriptures, which I check when I get home. He is always right. I name the guilty; he calls them Satan. The Bible did in fact foresee it all: John 8:44, or, if you prefer, Revelation 2:9. So we’re both right.

  I suppose it began with a sense, nothing more. Not even a vague sentiment, let alone the certitude that what the average child is taught about major historical events is a pack of lies. It was just a lurking mental itch. My father never spoke of the war, any more than he spoke of anything negative or disagreeable or, indeed, about the past at all, if he could help it. My mother spoke mostly about the past. Her past. But also, if the mood took her, of the superiority of Edwardian (stressed “a”) architecture over the Victorian equivalent, of her superior sense of dress and decoration, or of her war experiences. She maintained the convictions of her generation, among them, that Churchill had been a great man and Neville Chamberlain, a gullible one (“appeasement” may never shed its tarnish, although any attempt to prevent war must be commendable). Although she would lugubriously tell my brother and me that “you (note, not ‘we’) would have been gassed if you had lived in Germany,” she was in no sense Germanophobic, she even spoke some German. Of course, Germany had not been part of her past, so it was not included in the reminiscences that formed a large part of her conversation. I have never met anyone whose opinions were so wholeheartedly based on bygone criteria as my mother, or who so resolutely rejected any influence for change. She suffered the present, but judged it always through the filter of her past, however irrelevant.

  Until my late teens, my impressions of the war had been almost entirely derived from the pictorial adventures of heroic Allied servicemen, known as “trash” at school (inspired by these, I was a prolific doodler of battleships and planes). As the captive audience of my mother’s recollections of the Blitz, I habitually tuned out or deleted most of her repetitive anecdotes, out of resentment. I regret this now, as a clearer firsthand account of life in wartime London, however edited, would have been informative. But the very manner of my mother’s monologues hindered questions, which would have been considered mere interruptions of the scheduled broadcast.

  Associated topics included the “Wirtschaftswunder” years, the miracle of postwar German industrial reconstruction, to which my mother alluded during my parents’ few visits to my German school, in 1957. At nine, I was unsurprisingly unaware of this phenomenon, or of the incongruity of two advanced Anglo-Saxon nations destroying each other. About fifteen years later, I heard an irascible colonel on American radio voice a fitting verdict: “For the British and the Germans to be fighting each other was an inappropriate encounter situation.” All the Germans I knew were unfailingly pleasant and remarkable only for seeming each to possess the same model of shiny dark blue suit, in retrospect perhaps in itself an indication of their striving towards a return to bourgeois standards. The schoolchildren at Hermannsberg were also models of normality, in that, in their free time, they were chiefly occupied with games/sports, amusement, music and outdoor pastimes. That their ancestors and mine could have been incited to kill each other never occurred to me. The only reference to the war that I remember is of a glancing remark I overheard as I was drying myself after the morning shower, when two older boys were exchanging hearsay about the fate of German POWs in Russian captivity. Although it was typical of schoolboys’ gossip, the morbid subject naturally impressed me at the time.

  Since then, I have learnt much, some of it by reflection, some from books and records of and about the time, which by their copious footnotes and corroborative contents and cross-referencing, confirm that the sympathy I have always felt for this much-maligned and mistreated people is justified. In fact, I never gave the subject much thought, occupied as I was with my daily drudgery, until the Nineties, when, while I was ordering the contents of my deceased grandparents’ house, I chanced on a copy of the National Zeitung, the patriotic German newspaper to which my grandfather had contributed a column for several years during the Sixties. He had devoted his life, by means of books and articles, to supporting the Palestinians, among whom he had lived as a boy, during the first decade of the twentieth century. A Russian-Jewish immigrant, he had experienced much kindness from the local Arabs and had taken stock of the attitude and expectations of some of the Jewish settlers.

  The newspaper commanded respect, with its simple Maltese/Iron Cross logo and boldly independent informative stance. Although it entered my thoughts only intermittently, my ambition to communicate with its publisher and friend of my grandfather’s grew over the years, in measure as I was subjected to various revelations. No mission to d
iscover a universal truth inspired me, rather a wish to understand my times and the development of the world, in particular to explain to myself this catastrophic caesura during the 1940s, a warp not only in time, but in Western European character, during which the fathers and grandfathers of my German classmates had allegedly done the unspeakable. So hideous and shameful had been their crimes then that they had even acquired their own appellation. By inducing a particular bias into a hitherto neutral English word, a commodious new orthodoxy was invented, so powerful that its regular, ubiquitous invocation by the media had placed the entire Western world under its spell. How could this be?

  Due to the exceptional nature of the twelve years of National Socialism, a large and growing body of lurid fiction and alleged fact has materialized, based on its dramatic superficialities rather than on any study or comprehension of its socialist policies, and inspired by a particular agenda. Sobriety rejects sensationalism. A perusal of reputable historical sources, some of them quite hard to find, helped me to form my own opinion. The most powerful persuasion, however, did not come from the rather dry accounts in my reading, but from the perfectly straightforward deduction that a people with the traditions and culture of the Germans did not almost overnight become barbarians and commit mass murder. Their military did not lose its humanity just because it was accustomed to obeying orders. Most tellingly, the descendants of these reputed monsters could not have been the absolutely average children who surrounded me daily while I was at school in Germany, children who could have come from anywhere.

  Following accusations from holocaust revisionists, that World War II leaders never mentioned the alleged holocaust of the Jews in gas chambers, Richard Lynn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Ulster, reports his research into this matter, as follows:

  I’ve checked out Churchill’s The Second World War and the statement is quite correct - not a single mention of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide of the Jews,” or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war. This is astonishing. How can it be explained? Eisenhower’s “Crusade in Europe” is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Memoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war. (December 5, 2005)

  Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower”s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill”s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

  Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war. Robert Faurisson, “The Detail (the alleged Nazi gas chambers),” The Journal of Historical Review, March-April 1998 (Vol. 17, No. 2), pages 19-20)

  Before we go any further, a brief note about the word “Nazi.” “Nazi” is a political epithet invented by Jewish journalist and member of the Social Democratic Party Konrad Heiden, during the 1920s, as a means of denigrating the NSDAP and National Socialism.The term is an imitation of the nickname given to Marxists of the SDP at the time, Sozi. It was then popularised abroad by various Judaics and other subversives, including Heiden himself, who fled the country after the NSDAP were elected to government. The term was regarded as a derogatory epithet by National Socialists and was used almost exclusively by Marxist agitators. Typically, the use of Nazi Germany and Nazi regime was popularized by Jewish émigrés from Germany after 1933, especially in English-speaking countries. From them, it spread into other languages. (Metapedia)

  Nevertheless, there is a scheme to catch up retrospectively through a “planned” 16-volume(!) publication called Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945, kurz “VEJ”/”The Persecution and Murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945,” abbreviated “VEJ” (Wikipedia), published in single editions from 2008 onwards. To give this monstrosity the desired gravitas, it has been commissioned by a mix of official agencies and universities; the authors are the usual crew of ethnic German and non-ethnic backstabbers. (The Federal Archive, the Institute for Contemporary History, professorial chairs for recent and modern history at the Alberts-Ludwig University, Freiburg, and the Chairs for the History of Eastern Middle Europe at the Free University of Berlin (Wikipedia). An English translation will of course be available. Now that nearly no eye-witnesses survive, second and third generation fabulists can indulge themselves to their hearts’ content, without risk of contradiction. Their imaginations will doubtless serve as the source of sources, and even furnish “evidence” in legal cases.

  The 6 million figure, in connection with the claimed suffering of European Jews, appeared regularly in North American newspapers of record at least since 1915 (The Sun, June 6, 1915), presumably to prepare the ground among emotionally labile readers for the time when testimony to support such a claim could confidently be manufactured. The use of “holocaust” in this context was introduced as early as 1936 (New York Times, May 31, 1936). “Russian imperial leaders had long been suspicious of the Jews, and largely banished them to the so-called Pale of Settlement that was established in western Russia in the 1790s. Beginning in the 1880s, western media issued exaggerated reports of slaughters, pogroms, and assorted massacres among the Russian Jews there, whose aggregate numbers of victims were nearly always recorded—astonishingly—as ‘6 million.’” The New York Times carried periodic such reports. See, for example: 26 January 1891 (“Rabbi Gottheil says a word on the persecution of the Jews…about six millions persecuted and miserable wretches”), 21 September 1891 (“An indictment of Russia…a total of 6,000,000 is more nearly correct.”), 11 June 1900 (“[In Russia and central Europe] there are 6,000,000 living, bleeding, suffering arguments in favor of Zionism.”), 23 March 1905 (“We Jews in America [sympathize with] our 6,000,000 cringing brothers in Russia”), 25 March 1906 (“Startling reports of the condition and future of Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews…”). The situation led a former president of B’nai B’rith to a prophetic exclamation: “Simon Wolf asks how long the Russian Holocaust is to continue” (10 November 1905) (Inconvenient History).

  A mere 40 years before the story suddenly emerged in 1944, both the number and the precise terminology were used:

  Startling reports of the condition and future of Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews were made on March 12 in Berlin to the annual meeting of the Central Jewish Relief League of Germany by Dr. Paul Nathan, a well-known Berlin publicist, who has returned from an extensive trip through Russia as the special emissary of Jewish philanthropists in England, America and Germany, to arrange for distribution of the relief fund of $1,500,000 raised after the massacres last autumn. He left St. Petersburg with the firm conviction that the Russian government’s studied policy for the “solution” to the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination. (New York Times, March 25, 1906) (author’s italics)

  One does wonder who these “philanthropists” were, who sent the good doctor on his mission.

  How dare the smooth talkers, the clever official blabbers, open their mouths and boast of progress. ... Here they hold jubilant peace conferences in which they talk against war. ... But the same righteous Governments, who are so nobly, industriously active to establish the eternal peace, are preparing, by their own confession, complete annihilation for six million people,
and there is nobody, except the doomed themselves, to raise his voice in protest although this is a worse crime than any war ... (Max Nordau, Zionist Congress 1911, Basel/Perfidy by Ben Hecht, page 254, 1962) (author’s italics)

  ***

  The Appeal-- To save Six million Men and Women in Eastern Europe from Extermination by Hunger and Disease. The Obligation-- It is the duty of every person in New York to give the utmost he can spare to relieve the greatest need the world has ever known. (advertisement, NYT, May 5, 1920)

  Alone the overblown nature of this petition and its complete lack of dignity marks it and countless comparable Schnorrereien as typically Jewish (no other need has ever matched the need of the self-Chosen People), while simultaneously revealing its implausibility.

  The Bible is full of “burnt sacrifices,” which evidently pleased God (e.g. Leviticus 1:14-17 details all the mumbo-jumbo pertaining to burnt sacrifices). Apparently, Jewish prophecies in the Torah require that 6 million Jews must vanish before the state of Israel can be formed: “You shall return minus 6 million.” Those six million had to disappear in “burning ovens.” So six million Jews had to be gassed and end up in burning ovens to fulfil the prophecies and satisfy the Talmud Torah dogmatists—a necessary adjunct to the financial entrepreneurs-- of Israel’s legitimacy, according to their covenant with their God.

  There have been – and indeed continue to be – many efforts to memorialize the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, but this effort of the surviving Hassidic masters stands out. The Zohar records that there are 600,000 letters in the Torah. Truth be told, our scrolls have far fewer letters – 304,805 to be exact. Thus the number 600,000 cannot refer merely to a different text of the Bible, for the discrepancy is too great. The number 600,000 could therefore be considered a symbolic number.